The Forgotten Smile

by Margaret Kennedy

  The Bensons seemed to have survived this test of character with considerable credit. They had stripped Edwardes Square without quarrelling and with some consideration for one another’s needs. Kate was glad to know it. Had she been smiling down upon them from heaven she could have felt that her efforts to bring them up as civilized beings were not entirely fruitless. She did not, however, want to feel pleased with herself at this particular moment. There were too many flattering obituaries in the air already.

  Brian’s cordiality, when he joined her, was more welcome. Her magnanimity over the white tweed coat was not again mentioned but she knew that he was grateful. That at least was something which she had managed to do in the present.

  It seemed strange that she should now feel most at ease with him, among them all, for she had never liked him very much. As he mixed her a drink it occurred to her that he, perhaps, had never liked her very much. Her disappearance had given him so little distress that he could accept her reappearance as calmly as Fanny had done. He might have grieved for Judith, but that was probably the only pain that he had felt.

  He now asked her about her life on Keritha, a topic in which nobody else took the slightest interest. He seemed actually to understand that it was a real place, not some shadowy limbo across the Styx. She eagerly described the Challoners, their strange history, their beautiful house, and the charm of an island completely unencumbered by admonitory little notices. So well did he seem to understand this that she ventured to put the point: that official litter baskets under every tree might have a more devitalizing effect upon men than upon women. He gave her a sharp look, as though a little surprised to hear such a reflection from his bossy mother-in-law. Then he said:

  ‘I believe you’ve got something there. It must feel very odd to come back to the Welfare Kindergarten.’

  ‘But why does it suit women better?’

  ‘Women profit by it most. And they aren’t law abiding, you know. If a woman thinks a law is silly, she doesn’t give a damn for it. She may keep it, to save herself trouble, but she has no respect for the law as such. A lot of little notices don’t mean a thing to her. We men … even if we break the law, we do it more solemnly than you do. We’ve got all these bees in our bonnets about Law and Justice and Truth. Truth! Women couldn’t care less about it. Once a woman gets into the saddle, the things she’ll say! No man would dare. Why, if she thinks it’s for our good, she’ll announce, without turning a hair, that there’s no difference between butter and margarine. A man might tell us we’d jolly well got to eat margarine. He might tell us the nutrition value is the same. But only a Mother Dia …’

  Here Judith joined them, having put the children to bed. Brian mixed her a drink and demanded more details about Keritha.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Judith vaguely. ‘That place where you’ve been. Was it nice?’

  ‘The people,’ Kate told them, ‘are very odd. They’re all alike to look at and rather attractive. They remind me of a statue there is in the Acropolis Museum at Athens. A man carrying a little calf on his shoulders.’

  ‘I know,’ said Judith. ‘Moschophoros. We’ve got a photograph of him in a book, I think.’

  She hunted in the bookshelf while Brian said:

  ‘The archaic doesn’t photograph well. There’s a kind of life breathing in the actual surface of the stone which doesn’t come across. In a photograph it’s too much simplified.’

  ‘This man is smiling,’ remembered Kate. ‘I imagine Odysseus smiled like that when he was offered immortality and said: No thanks. I’d sooner be a man.’

  ‘Here he is,’ said Judith, bringing the book. ‘He’s nice.’

  As they all studied the picture she added, a little aggressively:

  ‘But he’d have been happier today. He was probably a slave. Owned by other people. Pushed about all his life.’

  ‘And not even pushed about for his own good,’ agreed Brian. ‘Poor chap! No butter and no Holy Mum to tell him that it was just the same as margarine.’

  He shut the book with a bang and put it down, adding:

  ‘For all that, I agree we’d probably think him an awful brute. He’s going to kill and eat that dear little calf. He’s merely smiling to think of his nice dinner.’

  ‘I suppose,’ said Judith sharply, ‘he ought to be scowling and saying: I kill and eat poor little calves. It’s dreadful, but I can’t help it. Oh, what a horrible man I am!’

  ‘He’d have to, if he lived in the Welfare Kindergarten. We’ve all had it properly drilled into us that we’re just naturally very naughty boys and girls.’

  Kate brightly strove to allay the tension in the air by telling more stories. She described the horror of Freddie and Edith when the Latona put in, the rite of the stone, the legend of the Visitors, and the offerings to the waterfall. These last Brian maintained to be less fantastic than certain offerings made to the characters in a radio programme called The People Next Door.

  ‘According to Bridie,’ he said, ‘one of these deities, these figments of the collective imagination, was recently compelled by the script writers, to give birth. Vanloads of offerings arrived at the BBC – nappies, shawls, bootees – all for a perfectly non-existent baby. What’s the difference between that and offerings to some pagan god?’

  Kate thought of the God of Keritha, whom nobody had seen, but who was there, born every year, dying every year, yet stronger than death. More Christian than England, Edith had said.

  ‘The gods were supposed to have power,’ objected Judith. ‘People were frightened of them. Nobody’s frightened of the families on radio programmes. They’re all supposed to be incredibly nice and ordinary. Just like us.’

  ‘So who has power nowadays?’ demanded Brian. ‘Nice ordinary democratic people, just like us. And we’re terrified of them, because they’re all very busy making You-Know-What. No wonder we send them nappies.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Judith in a tight voice. ‘The tiny brain can’t take that in.’

  ‘I must go,’ said Kate, jumping up.

  On the drive home she felt tempted to scold Brian for talking about the Welfare Kindergarten, since the term obviously enraged Judith. He did so, just as he had talked of ‘Holy Theophagy’ to devout communicants, in order to elicit an emotional, rather than intellectual, response.

  ‘Another thing I’ve come back to, that I’d rather forgotten,’ she said, ‘is this underlying anxiety, going on all the time, which affects everybody’s temper.’

  ‘You mean the shadow of the mushroom? They dodge it on Keritha? Plenty of people do that here, believe me. Judith, as you may have observed, is determined to take no notice of it whatever.’

  ‘That’s not such a bad line to take,’ protested Kate, ‘if we’re really in for a kind of universal Thermophylae.

  ‘The Spartans on the sea-wet rock

  Sat down and combed their hair.

  ‘Do you think there’s anything very manly about self-righteous explosions of Angst?’

  ‘Well! Well! That’s the first time I’ve ever heard you quoting poetry.’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake! Don’t you start telling me I’ve changed and mustn’t quote poetry because I never used to. I’ve not spent six months in a coffin. I’ve been in a place where people live and think thoughts.’

  Brian laughed.

  ‘Sorry. You have changed a bit. Why not? It must be quite a place, Keritha. But you know I’m afraid Freddie and Edith are fighting a losing battle. Someday somebody will publish a report on poor old Moschophoros.’

  ‘What harm would that do? Very few people will read it.’

  ‘Day trips,’ he prophesied, ‘to the Island of the Pixies. Boatloads, twice a week, to see Moschophoros doing his stuff. Some enterprising Tourist Company is sure to see how cute he is.’

  ‘He won’t oblige. He doesn’t like foreigners.’

  ‘He will, when he’s learnt to cash in on his dignity. All the kids will be lined up at the waterfall, offering to be photographed throw
ing sugar to the naiad. Giggling like anything. No wonder Freddie and Edith are frightened.’

  ‘I don’t think either of them is vulgar enough to think of it.’

  A moment later she shivered, no longer quite certain that Freddie had never foreseen some such squalid end for a harmless, defenceless little community. She had heard him quote a mysterious poem about the living who hold a funeral for their dead city. At the time she had associated the death of a city, or of any corporate existence, with violence and calamity; with war, plague, famine, fire, shattered masonry, terror, and lamentation. She now saw that none of these are inevitably involved. The ultimate, the most dire, obsequies are accomplished with a snigger.

  She thought of advising Brian to try phenobarbitone but held her tongue, partly from prudence and partly because she felt too ill to talk any more.

  4

  Next morning she felt no better and would have given much to stay in bed. The thought of poor Hazel, nursing a sick mother-in-law, got her out of it. The head cold was better but she was weak and unsteady as though she walked on clouds of cotton wool. Very slowly she got into her clothes, wavered downstairs, and helped Hazel with the breakfast.

  On the preceding night she had accepted an invitation to lunch with Douglas at the Chelsea flat. Andrew and Hazel had looked relieved when they heard of the engagement, as though they thought it high time that this inexplicable separation should cease. Permanent plans of some sort must soon be made. Perhaps she merely felt so ill because she wanted an excuse to dodge the visit. Later in the morning she crept off to Chelsea.

  The flat was exactly what she had expected. It evoked, subtly, a prefect’s study, preserving something of the cloistered school life in which the friendship of Douglas and Ronnie had taken root. There were no cricket or football groups on the walls, nor was there any clutter of toasting-forks, apples, boots, and textbooks. All was spare and neat, but the atmosphere was implacably masculine.

  Mrs McKintosh was not, of course, the invaluable Scots body they thought her to be. The rooms were not thoroughly cleaned nor was the lunch particularly good. They, however, clearly believed themselves in clover.

  Ronnie greeted her with his customary distaste. He was a rangy creature with bushy eyebrows and a very long neck. He earned his dinner, efficiently but without enthusiasm, in a Government Office. His leisure was passionately dedicated to fishing, music, mountain-climbing, and chess.

  During lunch he did nothing to help them out; he wolfed down his food while Kate and Douglas made strained conversation. To talk at all, or to swallow, had become an increasing effort for her. She braced herself to it and told them about Freddie’s collection of gramophone records, hoping that this might interest Ronnie, who collected them himself. He did, indeed, display some animation upon learning that Freddie possessed a record of Adelina Patti. He spoke:

  ‘Most improbable. That would be a museum piece.’

  ‘I’ve heard it,’ said Kate. ‘He often plays it.’

  ‘I doubt it. He wouldn’t play valuable records often. They might get scratched.’

  Douglas fidgeted uneasily although he might know by this time that she would not throw her pudding at Ronnie’s head.

  After lunch he left them, stumping out of the flat without leave-taking or apology. Kate, quite exhausted, lay back in her chair and tried to believe that a cognac was doing her good. Douglas sat waiting for her to say something.

  ‘I suppose,’ she murmured at last, ‘you’d really rather go on living with Ronnie?’

  ‘That’s impossible, now.’

  He rose and went to the window where he stood looking out at the wintry street while he said:

  ‘Naturally we must set up house together again. What else can we do? But I believe it will be better to tell you, as well as I can, what’s in my mind. How I feel about it.’

  He need not. She knew perfectly well that he had for years nursed a grievance against her, believing that she had only married him because she wanted children.

  ‘I quite realize I brought it on myself,’ he allowed, when he had persisted in telling her all this. ‘I had to ask you three times. Only a fool asks a woman more than once. If she loves him she takes him the first time. It was your mother who encouraged me to go on. She assured me that you really loved me. She was a great one, your mother, for getting her daughters to the altar.’

  Kate nodded, wondering whether she should not tell him her side of it. Her mother had upbraided her for those two refusals, and had brushed aside her objection that Douglas, although sexually attractive, seemed to have a streak of silliness which might annoy her later. All men, said Mrs Mortimer, even the best of them, are incurably silly. A woman’s happiness depends upon her ability to accept that fact.

  To tell him this now would serve no purpose. His bitterness was, on the whole, justified. She had married him, suspecting him to be silly, because she wanted a home and children. On the other hand, she had put up with his silliness, during their life together, with more patience than another woman might have shown, who had expected better from him. The loneliness and disillusionment, upon which he was now dwelling with considerable gusto, might have been his, whoever he had married.

  ‘But,’ he concluded, ‘all that is changed now. That’s why I’m making a clean breast of it, before we start again. All the bitterness suddenly melted away when you … when I thought you were dead.’

  ‘You saw the past quite differently?’ suggested Kate.

  ‘Well … yes …’ He looked slightly disconcerted as though she had stolen one of his lines. ‘You realize that? I thought of your life and asked myself what it had really been. I saw it suddenly as full of pathos … mysterious … unfinished …’

  ‘One often does when people die,’ said Kate.

  He was going to get through it without having to mention Pamela, whom he had now probably managed to forget, save as a financial client.

  ‘I’d always assumed,’ he was saying, ‘that you’d had exactly what you wanted out of life. Were a happy woman. But then, when I remembered you as you were when I first fell in love with you, I realized that long ago you were quite a different person. I looked through your papers and found a lot of relics of those years and the years, too, before I met you. Some queer little poems you must have written. And this, clipped together with some letters and a piece of bog myrtle.’

  He handed her a faded snapshot. A very young Kate sat in a boat on a lake with a boy in white flannels.

  ‘Michael!’ she said, peering at it. ‘He’s dead.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I told you about him.’

  ‘Yes. You loved him.’

  ‘He was killed. I got over it. I’ve hardly thought of him for years.’

  ‘If you’d married him you’d have been a different person. I suppose they were his letters, with the photograph. I didn’t read them, I burnt them. I kept this, to remind myself of what you really are. Our marriage was as much of a mistake for you as for me. Now we are getting old. We must finish our lives as best we can. But … I understand you better. Tell me what you’d like to do. Where you’d like to live.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said vaguely. ‘It’s all very complicated. There’s the dish-washer!’

  ‘What?’

  She stood up, swaying slightly.

  ‘Judith has our dish-washer. I’ll go home now … I mean, I’ll go back to that house … Hazel’s house … it’s difficult to think when it’s so cold. You’ve got everything mixed up. Those were Freddie’s poems. I copied them out. And I think I’d have been exactly the same person whoever I’d married. What we really have to worry about is furniture.’

  ‘I wish,’ said Douglas bitterly, ‘that you could ever manage for a moment to stop thinking of perfectly trivial things. I try to be frank with you …’

  ‘It’s not trivial. My coming back … it’s going to mean sacrifice from everybody … everybody giving up something to make room for me again. All their ideas and their dish
washers. I shouldn’t have come.’

  ‘Kate! You’re upset. You don’t know what you’re saying.’

  ‘Not very well. My cold makes me stupid.’

  ‘You should go to bed. I’ll take you to the bus stop. You go to bed and nurse that cold.’

  ‘Hazel would bring trays up. Too much for her …’

  He hustled her along the street to the bus stop. As they waited there he said:

  ‘You understand, don’t you, that I’ve said all this because I feel that we can’t start again without facing the truth?’

  ‘Oh yes. I agree. So we can’t start again, because I haven’t t-told you what I think. It’s t-too c-cold anyway. And you wouldn’t like it a bit. Here’s my b-bus.’

  She jumped on to it meaning to get out at South Kensington Station. When next she roused herself she was a long way past that. A violent fit of shivering assailed her. She shook all over, and her teeth chattered so loudly that the other passengers heard it and looked round at her. At the next stop she got out again in a hurry because this was the Addison Road where Edith lived.

  Edith ought to have an injection. She was late. She must hurry. It was not nearly so cold here as it had been in Chelsea, although a few snowflakes were drifting down from a leaden sky. It was unbearably hot. She would have liked to take off her coat as she panted along on cotton-wool clouds, past St Barnabas Church, past Oakwood Court, past many remembered houses, until she came to those two, side by side, the Mortimer house and the Challoner house.

  There were a great many bicycles outside Edith’s house. On such a very hot day, Edith would probably be out in the garden. The side door was not locked. She went through into a wintry expanse where it was growing very dark – very dark indeed, under the shadow of the mushroom. Down remembered paths, beneath leafless trees, she wandered, calling to Edith, until she came to the rustic bench at the far end.

  There she sat to rest for a moment and took off her coat. She would explain everything when she gave that injection. Edith would be surprised that everybody had got so old. Even Michael had been young for forty years achtung! Achtung! ACHTUNG! YOU ARE VERY ILL SAVE YOURSELF YOU WILL DIE IF YOU STAY HERE ACHTUNG! … Achtung! … achtung … I must remember I must remember it’s not true they are not all of them silly Freddie but we can’t start again he would keep nagging at me to be that other that girl he made her up nagging like Menelaus long afterwards when the young war was forgotten and everybody was old and Michael … sleeps … upon Scamander side.